If you're looking for ideas on how to “spice up” your college entrance application, then it may not be a good idea to grab those ideas from the Internet. The Universities and Colleges Admission Service (UCAS) based in the United Kingdom performed a study of personal statements on applications for U.K. universities and colleges.

The study covered 50,000 personal statements made on entrance applications. The applications were reviewed using technology from CFL Software Development, which has a program called CopyCatch. The research found 5% of the personal statements were borrowed from the Internet.

Out of 800 medical applications, 370 were found to use the statement “a fascination for how the human body works.” Another 234 had the account of an early childhood incident that used the statement, “burning a hole in pajamas at age 8.” Finally, 175 had a statement about “an elderly or infirm grandfather.”

BRIAN'S OPINION
Word to the wise. If you're looking for good phrases to put in your college entrance application, it's probably not a good idea to literally borrow the exact same phrases that you see somewhere on the Internet. Plagiarism is never a very impressive thing to colleges and universities when it comes to deciding whether to admit you are not.

Based on the statements found by the UCAS, I can only surmise one of two things. First, many of these applicants found their statements on the Internet at the same website. That's what UCAS thinks. Second, the U.K. has a serious problem about 8-year-olds getting access to fire and wanting to do some serious damage to their pajamas.

I think it would be in the best interest of students to be creative, honest, and original in their personal statements. If you don't believe your life is original and interesting enough to pique an interest from colleges and universities, then I don't think borrowing someone else's life is going to help. It's not good to start your college career out by being someone you aren't. There is plenty of time after you graduate for that in the business world.

USER COMMENTS 5 comment(s)

In other news..(3:42pm EST Fri Mar 09 2007)This is totally irrelavent to this site, maybe it should read:

Nothing newsworthy happening in the world of computing, so here is some crap because I have a fluff peice that needed writing… – by Doh

HAHA ^^(6:30pm EST Fri Mar 09 2007)Interesting but lol – by gaverick

Plagerism(9:33pm EST Fri Mar 09 2007)from websites is sooo easy to catch, just google it, thats what my father does when marking essays from his students. – by Karmek

Google(10:42pm EST Fri Mar 09 2007)sucks, they just list the same crap twice in the search results, plus they just suck for suckage purposes – by Doh

Common statements(2:44pm EST Sun Mar 11 2007)I'd have to say that the pajama incident seems unique enough to likely be plagiarism.

However a statement like “a fascination for how the human body works” is so generic that I doubt any of those that said that actually stole the words, any more than the person that just said “nice weather” plagiarized from the guy that told you that five minutes ago.